The History of Dayak (28): Bidayuh Struggle for Land Identity and Survival

The History of Dayak: A definitive and foundational volume that serves as a comprehensive guide to understanding Borneo and the Dayak in their full complexity, across multiple dimensions. Exceptional.

More than sixty years after Morrison wrote his account, the Bidayuh people, heirs of the Land Dayaks, continue to wrestle with enduring issues of land, identity, and sustainability. 

Modernization in Sarawak has brought roads, schools, and churches into the interior, yet it has also opened the way for large plantations and development projects that displace ancestral lands. 

What was once inherited without formal title is now contested ground, making Morrison’s work more than ethnographic memory, but a record of a world resisting the currents of change.

Morrison once observed that the Land Dayaks “lacked the urge to wander,” yet in the twenty-first century they move in a different sense, navigating between the global economy and state policies. 

Many work in cities and study at universities, but when the harvest season comes, they return to their villages, fields, rice, and forests, where their roots remain. Their spiritual bond with the land endures, expressed in prayers, songs, and the rhythms of cultivation, even as churches stand at the center of village life.

In the hill regions of Padawan, Bau, and Serian, the Bidayuh are shaping a renewed identity that blends tradition with modernity. They celebrate Gawai with dances and music once recorded by Morrison, now presented with stages, sound systems, and digital cameras. Young Bidayuh create documentaries about their villages, reclaiming narratives once told by outsiders, as those once photographed now tell their own stories.

The legacy of colonialism still lingers in administrative boundaries, legal language, and the way land is treated as a commodity. Yet the “spiritual attachment to the land” described by Morrison has become the foundation of a renewed movement to defend customary rights. Land is not merely an economic resource, but part of their existence as a people born of the soil of Borneo.

When Morrison wrote The Land Dayaks, he may not have realized his work would become a vital archive for the future. His photographs, now preserved in university libraries in Australia and Germany, stand as silent witnesses for those tracing their ancestral paths. 

Morrison  wrote with a gentle tone and sharp insight, allowing us to see the Bidayuh today as a people who still hold that the land is mother, the river is lifeblood, and the forest is the home of life’s spirit.

Morrison ended with a simple line, “They live in peace, and will remain so as long as their land is left to them.” 

Today, those words sound almost prophetic in a Sarawak that continues to change and a Borneo that is steadily opened. They remind us that true peace does not come from grand development, but from justice for those who have long cared for the earth with their own hands.